Socialistická státní služba

The paper deals with the fundamental theoretical questions of the socialist civil service. It explains the term civil service in the factual and legal sense (Chapter I), the origin of the bourgeois civil service and its systems (Chapter II). The part dealing with the socialist system of the civil service is embodied in Chapters III to V. It starts from the Marx-Leninist criticism of the bourgeois civil service and from the theory of the socialist machinery of state, especially of the demands made on the state machinery servants, expressed in the principles of the socialist civil service. It presents a brief picture of the development of the civil service in socialist countries which led to the reduction of the civil service legal regulation, since from the working and social aspect civil servants no longer differ from other employees. But the practice and theory have to resolve a number of specific problems of the civil service concerning the rights, duties and responsibility of the state machinery servants in the performance of their service and questions connected with the qualifications for civil service, allocation of the staff, service procedure, positive and negative stimulations. The jurisprudence faces the task of defining service relations, resolving the question of their legal qualification, investigating the content of the civil service at a given development stage and formulating appropriate proposals. The paper summarises the discussion that dealt with this topic in the professional press, especially in the USSR and Poland. Basing on the analysis of the standpoints expressed and on that of the valid Czechoslovak law it comes to the point of view that it would be convenient within the improvement process of the state machinery and of the socialist legality to consider strengthening the legal regulation of the civil service. The authoress bases her reasoning on the system approach. Civil service is part of the complicated state machinery system and should, therefore, express adequately its specifics. As a result of the social division of labour the civil service forms a sub-system of the social labour and belongs as such to the labour law system. It is further part of the organisational and legal system of the machinery of state — due to this character it belongs primarily to the system of the administrative law. As part of the state administration, of the uniform state system, it falls within the sphere of the political, social, legal structure and state activities and the relative branches of the legal regulation and scientific investigation. Many arguments speak for a uniform regulation of the foundations of the socialist civil service, especially the fundamental unity of the state machinery, the state interest and state commission to perform function (it is not just a matter of the interest of the various authorities and organisations), the requirement to balance the two components of the democratic centralism. This is a first elaboration of the problems in question in this conception in the Czechoslovak law. That is why the tendency of the paper is primarily general and theoretical. But it involves also a number of concrete legal regulation problems in connection with the selection of state machinery servants, their rights and duties, responsibility and other elements of the legal regime of state machinery servants.